Tulane needs to give its football coaches a fighting chance

The root reaches deeper than Bob Toledo. It reached deeper than Chris Scelfo, too. And it went deeper than Buddy Teevens, Greg Davis, Mack Brown, Vince Gibson and Larry Smith.

So the notion that most, if not all, of the current ills with Tulane’s football program will be healed with the firing of Toledo at the end of this season might sound logical and soothing, especially after consecutive losses to Duke and Army, two teams whom Tulane should be on equal footing with, but who mercilessly sledge-hammered the Wave by a combined score of 93-33.

But unless and until Tulane’s administration decides it wants a competitive program, and really shows it’s willing to do what’s necessary in terms of a budget and recruiting to make that happen, then all we’re waiting for is the next Toledo, whose record fell to 2-4 this season, and 15-39 overall, in Saturday’s 37-34 loss to Syracuse in the Superdome.

Or the next Scelfo, Teevens, Davis, Brown, Gibson or Smith.

Tulane’s continual dance with despair can’t possibly all be about bad coaching, regardless of whether that’s the perception.

All those men aren’t, and weren’t, lemonheads. Scelfo exited Tulane with a 37-57 record in eight years. Teevens was shown the door with an 11-45 mark in five years. Davis departed after going 14-31 in four years. Brown parlayed his 11-23 mark in three years into a new job with North Carolina. Gibson, the beacon of success among the group, managed to finish 17-17 in three years. And Smith jumped after his 9-3 record in his final season lifted his record to 18-27 in four years.

And all of them had at least a handful of moral, feel-good, program-appears-to-be-on-the-right-track losses.

But at some point, the school’s actual commitment has to be called into question.

It’s willingness to pay for what it says it wants in a coaching staff, and to allow that staff to recruit the type of athletes required to be competitive in Conference USA and anywhere else, has to be viewed as a source of shortcoming, just as much as game-day adjustments and execution.

And until that level is raised, we can’t truly expect to see much more than what we, unfortunately, have grown accustomed to seeing.

That’s not meant to serve as a swipe to current or past players. It’s simply the only conclusion that can be drawn from the past three-and-a-half decades of results.

Tulane hasn’t had three consecutive winning seasons since 1979-81, hasn’t had back-to-back winning seasons since Tommy Bowden’s teams were 7-4 and 12-0 in 1997-98, and hasn’t had a winning season since 2002.

No program that says it’s interested in success tolerates that, not without ripping up the blueprint and drawing up new plans that reach beyond changing the voice.

Instead of the voice, the program message has to be changed, specifically by pooling resources and making the program attractive to coaching candidates and to recruits.

Pay the coach and staff better, to lure and perhaps keep them. And crack open a window to allow in more of the kinds of players it will take to post a winning record more often than once a decade or so.

Tulane absolutely has the right to continue operating as it is, and has. Its academic standards and mission are admirable to say the least. Its student-athletes are poster children for the term.

But if that was all that mattered, the school wouldn’t keep firing football coaches. If graduation rates held more sway than Saturday scoreboards and GPAs meant substantially more than X’s and O’s, there’d be no reason for us to be theorizing that Toledo won’t be coaching the Wave in 2012, barring an amazing rally by his 2011 team.

The fact is, the smart money says he won’t.

Logical deduction says Toledo’s tenure is nearing its end. He’s a realist, and he understands that coaches with his record don’t buy green bananas.

Seven wins likely would earn him at least another season, but it’s hard to imagine where the other five will come from out of the final seven games.

That’s not to suggest Toledo, like the others, hasn’t made his share of mistakes. There can be no absolution when you’re more than 20 games below .500, when players keep repeating the same errors and losses to Army become commonplace.

But the blame doesn’t rest solely with Toledo, and it didn’t rest with almost all of his immediate predecessors, either.

They had help. Or, perhaps more accurately, they didn’t — at least, not enough of the right kind of help.

And until the coach does get the kind of help he needs from the school, we can’t rightfully expect much except more of the same. And neither can the administration, no matter what it says.